Because Craig Hancock addressed his post to me, I am replying to his thoughtful post. As I indicated in my last post, Jim Kenkel and I have also been interested in the relationship of grammar to text. Craig Hancock wrote: > Mechanical tests for adherence to traditional grammar are not the > right way to search for the sentence/whole discourse connection. Of course, this is right. I never claimed that such tests exist. In fact, the fact that such tests don't exist is evidence for my belief that sentence-level grammar discourse are very different kinds of knowledge. > The mechanical test you refer to (which I don't think will work > in all cases, though that is from memory) is a substitute for a deeper > and more functional understanding of the kinds of meaning being created. You should consult the teaching tips on the ateg.com site. These tests do not reflect any "deeper" understanding. > I have students, and I'm sure > you do also, who have been led to believe that good writing > has to have a thesis. That the world is full of wonderful writing that > is not thesis driven seems to have escaped their teachers. A mechanical > test for ideal text might be the presence of a thesis statement, by > which we could then throw out of the canon of nonfiction countless works > of priceless value. Sure, the world is filled with all kinds of writing. I am not teaching my students to write poetry or fiction. I am preparing my students to write research papers in their academic subjects and reports when they get jobs outside of the academic community. That kind of writing does have a clear thesis. > Like well formed > sentence, the idea of a well formed text is not as simple as it may > seem. I am not quite sure what you mean here. There are sentences that are more elegant than other sentences. Is that you notion of well-formedness? If so this observation is right. On the other hand, we have tests which can establish whether a string of words has an independent clause or not. Those tests are very robust. You are correct that no such tests exist for texts. > One > notion that distorts our understanding of this is the idea of the > sentence as complete thought. Another notion is that form at this level > is somehow neutral or that these are mere matters of correctness or of > style. Absolutely right. The "complete thought" definition for a sentence is terrible. > > We are probably all familiar with the interconnectedness of form > and meaning at the level of whole text. If I talk to a student about a > paper, I might achieve the same result by talking to him/her about > content (I think this material doesn't fit your narrowed sense of > subject) or about form (why don't you cut the last half of the second > paragraph?) And surely no one would argue that a poem's meaning is not > intimately connected to its images or that a story's meaning can be > disconnected from its plot structure. This same interconnectedness is > there at the level of the grammar. And, here is where we part company. The kinds of interconnectedness in a text are very different from the kind of interconnectedness in grammar. That is why the teaching tips work and no such tips exists for texts. > SFG presents three kinds of meaning as encoded in the clause, and > these three kinds of meaning -- expressive, interactive, and > representational -- have been with us as whole text concerns since > classical rhetoric. As literature teacher and as teacher in writing > workshops, I can attest to the usefulness of looking at a whole text > through these lenses. What is the writer trying to say? Who seems to > be the intended audience and what relationship to the reader is being > established? What does this text reveal about independent happenings in > the world? These are wonderful questions to ask about a text, but you have just left the realm of grammar. Bob Yates, Central Missouri State University To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list" Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/